John is Director of the Information Interfaces
Research Group whose mission is to help people take advantage of
information to enrich their lives. As the amount of data available to
people and organizations has skyrocketed over the past 10-20 years,
largely fueled by the growth of the internet, insufficient methods for
people to benefit from this flood of data have been developed. A
central focus of many of the group's projects
is the creation of information visualization and visual analytics
tools to help people explore, analyze, and understand large data sets. In
particular, they are creating visual analytics systems to help people
with "sense-making" activities on data sets such as large document
collections. The group also has developed a number of
techniques and systems for providing people with peripheral
awareness of useful information. John's passion about research in and
the value of data visualization is illustrated in
his EuroVis 2014 Conference
Capstone invited lecture.

John is a faculty investigator in the Dept. of Homeland Security's
VACCINE Center of
Excellence (GT
page) focusing on developing
visual analytics technologies and solutions for grand challenge
problems in homeland security, and in the NSF FODAVA Center exploring
the foundations of data analysis and visual analytics. He is also an
affiliated faculty member in the Tennenbaum Institute at Georgia Tech.